Another cog in the culture industry

January 27, 2006

I don't usually link to subscription-only articles, but Yossi Klein Halevi has written an exceptionally fine analysis of the meaning of Hamas's election victory.

The opening paragraphs spell out the lesson that should be plain to everyone by now:

Here then is the real asymmetry of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Precisely at the moment when a majority of the Israeli people has accepted not just the political necessity but moral legitimacy of a Palestinian state, the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people empowers its most hateful and triumphalist ideology.

A two-fold spin has already begun. The first spin concerns Hamas. The same commentators who once assured us that power and responsibility would transform Yasir Arafat from terrorist to statesman now assure us that Hamas leaders similarly will be transformed by the process of governance. Fatah was supposed to control Hamas; now, presumably, Hamas will control itself.

And so get ready for the era of the wink and the hint. Experts will examine Hamas statements for signs of the slightest shift; they will ignore what Hamas tells its own people and celebrate every seemingly reasonable utterance to Western journalists. And Hamas leaders will readily oblige: They will speak of "peace," just as Arafat spoke of the peace of the brave. And the peace they will mean, as the bitter Israeli joke once went, is the peace of the grave.

The essence of Hamas is a commitment to destroy the religious affront of Jewish sovereignty. For Hamas to "moderate" would mean turning into an apostate of its own most sacred truth. If the process of moderation didn't happen to the less devout Fatah, which continues to reject Israel's legitimacy and now opposes terror only on temporary tactical grounds, it surely won't happen to Hamas.

The second spin concerns the Palestinian people. Palestinians, we're being told, didn't really intend to vote for the bad Hamas that blows up buses and promotes Holocaust denial and enshrines the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its charter. They were simply fed up with Fatah corruption and voted for the good Hamas that provides social benefits and a sense of discipline and purpose. True, Palestinians were understandably outraged at Fatah, which was the recipient of billions of dollars of foreign aid and managed in the last decade not to rehabilitate a single refugee camp. Yet to excuse the landslide vote for Hamas is to continue to patronize the Palestinian people, as most of the international community did through five years of suicide bombings. Palestinians voted for a movement for whom means and ends are identical: The suicide bombings are mini-preenactments of Hamas's genocidal impulse. Not to hold the Palestinians responsible for their fate, when they vote democratically, is to deny them the right to define themselves.

In truth, Hamas's victory doesn't mark the end of the peace process. That's because the peace process ended five years ago, when Arafat responded to Ehud Barak's peace overtures with the terror war. A recent poll asked Israelis the following question: If Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, uproots the settlements, redivides Jerusalem, and signs a peace treaty with a Palestinian state, would the conflict end or would terror continue? Some 70 percent responded that the conflict would continue. And that was before the rise of Hamas. What the Hamas victory has ended, then, is the pretense of a peace process.

Unfortunately, because self-deception will continue to hold sway in many quarters, we'll be treated to what are now the usual useless appeals to restart the peace process.

January 22, 2006

So, you're contemplating the possibility of a military strike against Iran's nuclear program, but you're not quite sure how to go about it. This article by David Sanger will give you a few ideas. But if you decide to follow through, don't say that Mr. Sanger didn't warn about the likely consequences.

Not too long ago I posted a brief entry on Peter Bergen's new book The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al-Qaeda's Leader. I mention the earlier post because I see that Aziz Huq has interviewed Bergen about his book for The American Prospect.

January 17, 2006

Here's a remarkable column by E. J. Dionne, Jr. of The Washington Post that discusses ongoing right-wing efforts to smear Pennyslvania Democrat John Murtha. You'll recall that Murtha, a decorated veteran and fervent supporter of the U.S. military, drew right-wing fire recently because he called for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

What makes the column so remarkable  to me at least  is not its overall content, but rather its opening sentence:

I underestimated the viciousness of the right wing.

How could Mr. Dionne, who is much more knowledgeable about politics than I, possibly be surprised at this late date by the vile tactics of right-wing whoredom?

January 15, 2006

Robert Kagan points out that the U.S. is still the indispensable nation on the international scene, in spite of its nearly global unpopularity.

Here's an especially nicely formulated insight:

There are . . . structural reasons why American indispensability can survive even the unpopularity of recent years. The political scientist William Wohlforth argued a decade ago that the American unipolar era is durable not because of any love for the United States but because of the basic structure of the international system. The problem for any nation attempting to balance American power, even in that power's own region, is that long before it becomes strong enough to balance the United States, it may frighten its neighbors into balancing against it. Europe would be the exception to this rule were it increasing its power, but it is not. Both Russia and China face this problem as they attempt to exert greater influence even in their traditional spheres of influence.

The rest of the column looks at some of the most important conflicts and hotspots around the world and discusses how the U.S. is routinely called upon to play a role in them.

AP writer Jeannine Aversa has written a useful analysis of the possible effects of the growing federal budget deficit.

Here's a short excerpt:

The government's budget deficit last year was $319 billion. While smaller than the record $413 billion in 2004, it still was the third-highest ever.

A White House budget official now predicts that the deficit in the current budget year will top $400 billion, pushed up by the costs of the Gulf Coast hurricanes. The red ink is expected to keep flowing for years.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office forecasts deficits every year through 2015; that is as far out as the office projects. The White House forecast, which runs to 2010, also expects annual shortfalls.

As Aversa goes on to explain, the Bush administration wants to reduce the deficit by cutting spending, not by giving up its tax cuts. Starving the beast is still the operative GOP strategy, it seems.